Developers Make Pitch For Transportation Impact Fee

October 16, 1985|By Goldie Blumenstyk of The Sentinel Staff

Developers who earlier this year persuadedOrange County commissioners to delay adopting a transportation impact fee met privately Tuesday with Mayor Bill Frederick to urge him to approve their alternative fee plan.

''We got a very positive response from the mayor,'' said Lee Chira, who attended the meeting arranged by fellow developer Tommy Tompkins.

Although Orlando has been working on a transportation impact fee for several years, city planners have yet to say how much the fee might be. Instead, at Frederick's direction, the city is lying low on the impact-fee issue while county officials debate with developers.

During the summer, developers blasted county plans for impact fees that would add about $1,000 to the cost of a single-family house and $18 per square foot for a small store. The money would help build new roads.

Now Tompkins' group, the Committee for Responsible Growth Management, is drawing up its own version of an impact fee. Those fees would be almost half of the county's proposed fees, Chira said, because the group used a different formula to calculate the traffic impact of development.

Tompkins said he didn't know how his committee's fee scale would compare to Orlando's proposed charge. ''I didn't know what the level of their fee was and still don't,'' he said.

Chira said Frederick gave no promises about the city adopting the committee's version but did say he would like the city and county fees to be similar. Orlando officials have said they fear that if city fees are higher than county fees, it would discourage annexations.

Frederick would not comment on the issue.

But city staffers who also attended the meeting said they warned the developers that they oppose one concession Orange County made: They do not want Orlando to reduce impact fees using money from the new 2-cents-per-gallon gas tax.

Instead, city officials promise to use their share of the gas-tax funds to improve existing roads.

Orange County lowered its proposed impact fees by using gas-tax money to improve roads affected by new development.